Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials

Middle East Eye

13-05-2025

Ancient buildings are the keepers of secrets: the ghosts and stories of the people who have gone before rest within their walls.
Despite attempts to conceal the past, remnants stubbornly remain, as anyone who has renovated can attest - faded posters, peeling wallpaper, chipped paint - such immutable objects can bear witness to a forgotten time.
In this meditative travelogue, Raja Shehadeh and his wife Penny Johnson, both in their eighth decade, contemplate the hidden history and geography of historic Palestine, now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
This is a place where even 'archaeology is politicised'.
The couple's quest is to reveal the lost, neglected and intentionally erased stories that criss-cross and sustain the land.
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In languid prose their journey illustrates how a rich, cultural heritage has been lost, and how these forgotten monuments and memorials reveal much about a common past and a possible future.
The book, the seed of which germinated from a lockdown walk on a deserted road near the wall separating the occupied West Bank from Israel, and a chance discovery of a forgotten memorial stone for three Egyptian soldiers who perished in the 1967 war, is divided into five distinct sections that illustrate its historical breadth.
The authors cover Palestine's past and its troubled present; Ottoman times; traces of the Nakba; intimations of mortality (where they visit the graves of friends, including the poet Mahmoud Darwish); and Ramallah ruins and the future of our pasts.
Under our anointed tour guides, time slows and information is imbibed. Mindful to the burden of detail, the couple gently unpeel layers to reveal the fascinating narratives that underpin the places they visit.
'Bearing the weight of many pasts'
This is not without hindrance; the authors are forced to negotiate checkpoints, road barriers and detours to reach these destinations, whose very geography has been splintered on purpose.
They travel to Nablus, a city that 'bears the weight of many pasts', from Ramallah along the congested Highway 60.
Their memories of the old road with its 'near pristine hills and agricultural landscapes' become an ever distant echo, as Israeli bulldozers gouge into the hills near the town of Hawara on the approach to Nablus, as they construct a four-lane bypass connecting Israeli settlements in the west to those of the east.
In Nablus, they come across a triptych, strangely evocative of the lustrous 'religious three-panelled paintings that graced altars in Byzantine or Renaissance churches', except this memorial is rendered on stark white stone brick with a black fence protecting it.
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On the wall are the faded posters of young men organised as a trinity, martyrs who perished during the first and second Palestinian intifadas, condemned to be young forever.
The couple relate the history of the Old City, how it was the eye of the storm during the Second Intifada in April 2002, and how both Palestinian civilians and fighters perished during a 10-day curfew, with homes and historic buildings, including an Ottoman era palace, sustaining collateral damage.
Sometimes there are no signs of what has gone before. Shehadeh and Johnson travel to Kfar Kanna, a town near Nazareth, which according to Christians is famed as the place where Jesus turned water into wine, in search of a memorial to the Nakba.
In an unremarkable circular plaza stocked with plastic chairs, they find a sole monument - a rectangular pillar topped with an urn filled with drooping plants.
Squint at the wall behind it and the dead are listed through the decades, from the 1930s to the 2000s.
The monument was unveiled in September 2000, a few days before the Second Intifada. As the traffic roars around them, the couple feel the weight of silence.
Reclaiming narratives
Voids in memory are often filled by art. In the museum of Ein Harod, an Israeli kibbutz, a major retrospective profiles Palestinian artist Asim Abu Shakra's vivid paintings of potted cacti.
The artist, who tragically died of cancer in 1990 at the age of 28, repeatedly painted these hardy plants in bright colours in order to reclaim the narrative surrounding them.
For Israelis, the cactus has been adopted as a national symbol, but the plant is also replete with meaning for Palestinians - its thorns offering protection; its fruit sustenance.
(Profile Books)
The artist was drawn to it because of its 'amazing ability to flower out of death'. As our authors note, his work offered 'beauty in response to the Nakba and its consequences'.
Erasure is a constant theme. The couple visit Charles Clore Park, a seaside resort built on the ruins of Manshiya, a coastal city that Palestinians once named 'the bride of the sea'.
The story behind the park's creation - it was named after the UK billionaire that funded its construction - and the obliteration of a city with 12,000 inhabitants, has sobering parallels with Trump's ideas of turning Gaza into the 'Riviera of the Middle East'.
The authors observe that this is an ongoing historical tragedy; they are unable to access the Gaza Strip and note that the eradication and erasure of its cultural heritage will ultimately lead to the dispossession and displacement of its people, who will no longer be able to prove their connection to the land.
Towards the end of the book, Johnson sees a ruby red anemone blossoming amongst the rubble and ruins that dot the Ramallah hills.
There is always hope. The past can never be completely erased, clues remain for those willing to look closely.
This precious jewel of a book is a call to preserve the past in order to secure the future. Its hauntingly evocative prose stays with you long after its final pages have been turned.
Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials (2025) by Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson in published by Profile Books